Making Sense of the Intercultural

Finding DeCentred Threads

Adrian Holliday, Sara Amadasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351059176
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this book we wish to find a new way of talking about, connecting and operationalising the third space, narratives, positioning, and interculturality. Our purpose is to shake established views in what we consider to be an urgent quest for dealing with prejudice.

We therefore seek to draw attention to the following:

• How Centre structures and large culture boundaries are sources of prejudice
• How deCentred intercultural threads address prejudice by dissolving these boundaries
• How, in everyday small culture formation on the go, the cultural and the intercultural are observable and become indistinguishable
• How agency, personal and grand narratives, discourses, and positioning become visible in unexpected ways
• How we researchers also bring competing narratives in making sense of the intercultural
• How third spaces are discordant and uncomfortable places in which all of us must struggle to achieve interculturality

This book is therefore a journey of discovery with each chapter building on the previous ones. While throughout there are particular empirical events (interviews, reconstructed ethnographic accounts and research diary entries) with their own detailed analyses and insights, they connect back to discussion in previous chapters.

1 Distant lands and the everyday

In this book, we try to move how we think of the intercultural to another place. The core concept of deCentring involves pulling away from the established, false, Centre notion of bounded, homogenous, separate, large cultures associated with nation, ethnicity and religion. We follow much critical sociology in defining the Centre as interrelated dominant structures, discourses and narratives which define and reproduce a world order. We characterise large cultures as Centre forces because they impose structures which confine and reduce people, who are presumed to be contained by them, to prescribed stereotypes. It is for this reason that we write this book to attempt a demonstration of how deCentring the intercultural is necessary if we are to address the prejudices that arise from these Centre, large culture forces. DeCentring the intercultural in no way denies diversity, but refuses to bind it in large culture blocks.

We do this by reflecting on the play of narratives and positioning in instances of small culture formation on the go. These are a series of empirical events which involve children with migration backgrounds, university students abroad and ourselves, in interaction within interviews, workshops and reconstructed ethnographic accounts. While these participants have particular features, they represent all of us everywhere.

To underpin this task, we employ an alternative, postmodern understanding of a truer, hybrid, shifting nature of culture, where imagined large culture boundaries are known to be ideologically constructed.¹ This framing of the conflicting understandings of culture is inspired largely by Gerd Baumann’s (1996) ethnography of the London Borough of Southall, where references to culture are multiple and creative, dependent on who is speaking to whom and about what. While this non-essentialist notion has achieved some recognition (MacDonald & O'Regan 2011), discourses of bounded homogeneity continue to be deeply ingrained in persistent narratives of culture that surround us both in the academy and in everyday life (Holliday 2018c; Holliday & MacDonald 2019). This is why moving how we think to a hybrid, shifting, unbounded, non-essentialist mode is a constant struggle and requires far more than the normal change in understanding. In the writing of this book, we acknowledge the fear and dismay that can arise when we pull away from Centre structures, and our inability to face and accept the true complexity of social life. This does not mean that we should not try to pull away, faced as we are by the prejudices towards others that we see around us every day.

1 We have moved away from the distinction between solid and liquid cultures (Dervin 2011, citing Bauman) because while solid implies boundedness in a very definite sense, liquids also have boundaries, albeit more fluid.

In the words of Kuhn (1970), it is part of an ongoing paradigm revolution through which deeply established Centre discourses have constantly to be shaken. Framing this paradigm shift as deCentring is thus a way of signalling the seriousness of what needs to be done.

As the book is about the deCentring of the intercultural, we are not therefore writing about the interaction between perceived ‘members’ of separate bounded homogenous cultures. Indeed, within the unbounded hybrid perception of culture it is hard to distinguish between the intercultural and the cultural. Our core concept of small culture formation on the go is the basic site for engaging with culture from an early age wherever and with whomever we are. Speaking of the intercultural rather than the more common ‘intercultural communication’ signals a state of being rather than a movement between – perhaps indeed of always being rather than just when we are travelling to distant places – which recognises a cultural diversity and perhaps discord everywhere as the first step in the interculturality of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. Recognising that everything cultural is also intercultural is a way of alluding to the natural ambivalence and hybridity of who we all are at all times.

Here it is worth noting that the concept of hybridity has had different readings. Essentialist readings have been that it is an in-between space between homogenous cultures (Fairclough 2006: 25). The non-essentialist, deCentred reading is very different. Stuart Hall states that ‘new identities of hybridity’ are replacing ‘national identities’ for all of us (1996a: 619), Homi Bhabha that it is the nature of culture per se (1994: 56), Delanty that it is the nature of the cosmopolitan (2006: 33), and Guilherme that it represents an ‘upsurge of new forms of life’ (2002: 128). It is this reading that helps us to understand also the third space, not as an in-between, temporary place where bounded and homogenous cultures can be negotiated, but as where we need, perhaps uncomfortably, always to stand if we are to see the hybrid complexity of things.

This first chapter will attempt to unravel these concepts, upon which the rest of the book will then develop its discussion. However, because we want theory to emerge from direct observation, we will begin with an event. The choice of this event grew out of we two authors asking each other what happened in our lives that set us off thinking the way that we do about the intercultural. While it is therefore based on something real that happened to one of us, we present it as a fictionalised, reconstructed ethnographic account. In such accounts throughout the book, we say neither where the characters come from nor in which countries the events are located. This is both to maintain anonymity and to help focus on small culture processes without being seduced by large culture imageries. Applying this ethnographic discipline of making the familiar strange makes us try hard to put these ­imageries aside. By shifting whatever our personal knowledge of whichever of us the character might be to another persona also helps us to enter into a less comfortable third space from which we can have another view of what might be going on. We have made Kati ambivalent about the concepts of ‘white’ and ‘European’ to disturb the event in which we place her.

Kati in Exia²

2 Exia is a fictitious name for a country that is constructed as exotic by those who visit it, as used by Holliday (2011, 2018c) where it is important to indicate such a country without naming an actual place.

The following is a reconstructed ethnographic account of an incident experienced by a young anthropology student named Kati during a study visit to Exia. It introduces a number of key elements of the book. It is an instance of small culture formation on the go, where, in a passing encounter, she reflects on how she is positioned and positions herself within a wider cultural environment. Her intervention into her own thinking disturbs what might have become her dominant narrative of what she thinks is going on and therefore takes her into a deCentred third space. Kati is a fictional character who will reappear throughout the book, based upon a number of people we researchers have interviewed or observed.

That evening Kati ate a mango in the Exian countryside. Actually, she ate a lot of mangos in Exia, but this one was linked to a meaningful moment that frequently came into her mind in conducting her research work years after.

It was an evening in August and it was already dark. One of those evenings of the rainy season when everything seems uncertain because a storm might arrive suddenly. Kati and her group were used to eating all together in the centre of the courtyard under a gazebo that hosted all the social events taking place inside the village association that was hosting her.

That evening, after dinner, she was sitting alone in a corner of that same gazebo when her friend, Diak, came and sat next to her with this mango in his hand. He cut it into sections and they shared it, in silence, spending some minutes there, eating the mango without saying a word.

Kati did not speak his language, but had learnt French at school, and could therefore speak it with him and the people of the village who had also had the chance to study it. Although Diak spoke poor French, he usually tried his best to narrate his stories to her. They came to know each other through music. Some evenings, after dinner, he put his mobile phone in the middle of the courtyard and played music while everyone was chatting or looking at the sky above the savannah. Other times, after lunch, he took Kati’s mp3 player, put on the earphones and spent his time just listening to the music, with intense curiosity in his eyes.

The silence of that evening was not due to anything related to being speakers of different languages though. That silence was rather a new but perfect language between Diak and Kati that was perfectly suited to that specific moment. The next morning he had to leave the village, to start a new life in Europe. And while Kati was sad to see her friend leaving, she could also perceive how he wasn’t hiding from her his fear for this new experience and the sadness of leaving the village and the friends he grew up with.

If we think about migration as the human need to move somewhere else to find things you do not have in the place you usually reside, be it money, love, work or knowledge, Kati could also consider herself a temporary migrant in those days. She had left two months before to study transnational migration in that village, moving to a place she had never been before and whose language she did not speak. Of course, there were differences between their experiences and she was aware of this. For example, unlike Diak, she already had a return ticket, while he did not know when he would be able to return.

But in those months she came slowly to realise how she was an object of observation and prejudice from the people around, which in some moments, made her really feel a foreigner there. The first and easiest way through which people defined her was her being ‘white’ and a woman, though in other places there were people who she knew considered themselves ‘white’ in contrast to her. She certainly didn’t consider herself ‘European’, which was what the word they often used for her seemed to mean.

She knew that these things happen everywhere, because every individual risks falling into the trap of Othering, as well as being Othered. But it was exactly finding herself in the position of being Othered that made her start to understand the relevance of creating a space with people around to let the other know more about who you are, to push knowledge beyond the surface of categories and to manifest yourself as a specific person, with all your contradictions and layers of complexities.

She thus started to try to look at herself with the eyes of the people around her; and she felt this deep need to claim a space of interconnection with them, to increase the possibility of cutting across the categories of ‘foreign student’ and ‘Exian hosts’.

As soon as this dichotomy was evident to her and she intervened to disturb it, she realised that, while she was thought to be the one who was there to observe, she was actually the object of the study of the people she met, with no exception of Diak himself, who, while demonstrating curiosity about her journey and the place she had left, was preparing his departure with discretion, and without revealing his plan until the very last days.

It was not just on the evening of the shared mango, but on the evenings after, when Diak had already left and his funny jokes were no longer populating the courtyard, that Kati clearly understood how they had both something to study and explore in the other, but that this was not due to being ‘members’ of different cultures. It was instead linked to the resemblance between the experiences they were living or approaching to live, each one with its peculiarities, but, at the same time, similar in their way of involving the circuits of common feelings.

We have started with this event to demonstrate how an apparently simple and innocent event can disturb the common narratives that we construct to make sense of what we are doing, and to lead us into a deCentring perspective in which new meanings can be tested and investigated. Despite language and different national backgrounds and Kati’s perceived distance from the people of the village, Diak’s sharing of his story with Kati created the possibility of a thread that began to dissolve expected large culture boundaries. The unexpectedness of this thread, and the fact that Kati had to work to re-align her own positioning before she could appreciate it, brought the kind of disturba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Distant lands and the everyday
• 2 DeCentred threads resist the expected
• 3 Centred threads become blocks
• 4 Who are we as researchers?
• Bibliography
• Index